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Some Thoughts on Conan + Margaret Brundage

Though I read and talked about Kull some time back, I have only recently started reading Conan. Beginning at both ends, I’ve been reading the Del Ray collection “The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian” in bits on my lunch breaks and have just finished the 1977 edition of Red Nails over the last couple days at home.

Though I’m enjoying the hack & slashery of the late Conan (I haven’t made it far enough into the early stories to form an opinion), I have to say that it does not quite reach the momentous depths of Kull. Of the stories collected in Red Nails, Beyond the Black River comes the closest to those gloomy and brooding tales of the Atlantean King, with its sense of impending doom that hangs over the fragility of civilization’s facade.

Okay, so maybe Delcartes’ Cat wasn’t a high point for Kull, Thulsa Doom or Howard.

However things that were absent from Kull (namely the copious amounts of naked shrieking women and girl-on-girl whipping) did leave the impression that they were tacked on in an attempt to make sales and land a Margaret Brundage cover*, and, in isolation, could explain why Lovecraft scholar ST Joshi would write Howard off as a hack and why his statements would be so perplexing to someone who had read Kull but not Conan. Brundage had real influence on the magazine’s content, and writers would more or less cater to her fetishes in hopes that Wright would throw one of their story’s scenes her way for a cover.

Brundage herself is experiencing a bit of a resurgence; she received a posthumous award at last year’s Worldcon and is up for another this year, I believe. As female icons of the early sci-fi era are being rediscovered and celebrated, Brundage gets to enjoy some of the deserved accolades for her contribution to the field, but she also presents a bit of an uncomfortable truth that iconic women aren’t always going to be what people who are looking for iconic women want to see.

While some women in SFF have faced erasure, Brundage apparently faced pillory. In the Foreword and Afterword of the 1977 hardback of Red Nails (published only a year after Brundage’s death), Karl Edward Wagner took the opportunity to excoriate Brundage for terrible art no less than four times**.

Today’s controversial figures like Bayonetta or Lara Croft pale in comparison to those depicted by Brundage, who herself was clearly fascinated (perhaps enamored) with BDSM. As people rediscover her and her artwork, they are bound (pun intended) to be polarized by her subject matter. Regardless of how you feel about her and her artwork, her influence on the fiction of the 1930s is undeniable.

*There was additional intent for Howard, however, as he’d said once wanted to explore the themes of how institutionalized deviant sexuality was symptomatic of cultural decadence. Worth noting that by Howard’s comments on sexuality, law and civilization, we’re probably about where Xuchotil was right before their wizards all died off.

**:I’ll admit, I misremembered this; while he mentions Brundage several times, he does not out and out say that she herself is bad, but does reference a few of her works negatively:

“It is late spring of 1935. Despite the wretched Margaret Brundage cover, you have just plunked down a quarter for the May issue of Weird Tales.”

“Wright seems to have been experimenting: the issue featured “a weird Craig Kennedy murder mystery” by Arthur B. Reeve, set off by a non-erotic Margaret Brundage cover that was possibly her worst ever.”

and he does go on to praise the cover for “Shadows in Zamboula” as “one of Margaret Brundage’s best pastels”.

5 responses to “Some Thoughts on Conan + Margaret Brundage”

I haven’t gotten to Kull yet, but I’ve read a good chunk of the Conan stories and it was kind of my gateway into the world of pulp/golden SFF I’m now exploring. So I can’t compare yet, but I at least owe Conan that.

I haven’t come across anything to indicate one way or another, but I wonder if Howard intended for Conan to be a descendant of Kull. Conan’s people are said to have descended from the Atlanteans, I believe. Or maybe Conan was just Kull mk 2. I dunno.

The first Conan story was a rewrite of By This Axe, I Rule!; the Conan version “Phoenix on the Sword” dialed back the brooding conspiracy paranoia, cut out the values dissonance love-story plot, and made Conan “the chosen one” by having an ancient sage enchant his blade in a dream. I just finished it, and it was a much weaker story, in my opinion. Originally, Conan was, I think, a rebranding effort to move from psychological thriller to action-adventure.

As for whether the character was descended in any way, I highly doubt it, since Kull apparently did not establish a line.

Yeah. It’s interesting that Kull is implied to have had the same past as Conan, but with one exception (the story of why he was first exiled from Atlantis), all of the stories featuring Kull revolve around his crusade against evil pre-human races and various death cults following the exposure of the reptoids.

Kull is a favorite of mine, and I’ve wondered if Kull was the hero Howard wanted to write, where Conan was the hero he chose to write to meet what the market wanted. In any case, if you are just starting to read his works, don’t neglect Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn and Turlough Dubh. Great stuff.